The Budapest Open Access Initiative celebrated its 20th anniversary on February 14, 2022.
To celebrate this occasion, the BOAI steering committee released a set of new recommendations based on the original principles that reflect the developments that shaped the Open Access world in the past 20 years and that characterize the current circumstances of the academic landscape.
These past 20 years made clear that "OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all, to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research. We must assess the growth of OA against the gains and losses for these further ends. We must pick strategies to grow OA that are consistent with these further ends and bring us steadily closer to their realization."
The four high-level recommendations that have been defined address systemic problems that obstruct progress toward equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research.
- Host OA research on open infrastructure
- Reform research assessment and rewards to improve incentives
- Favor inclusive publishing and distribution channels that never exclude authors on economic grounds
- When we spend money to publish OA research, remember the goals to which OA is the means
Reading the full-text of the recommendations is a good way to stay informed about the Open Access world. The Frohring Library supports the OA movement and will follow the recommendations to support open data, open metadata, open citations, open code, open protocols, open books, open theses and dissertations, open educational resources, open courseware, open digitization projects, open licenses, open standards, open peer review, and the many practices that make up open science.